Sweeping changes

Sometimes in my games I have to make sweeping changes. It’s tricky to do too much at once because any one thing that gets modified requires the remaining components to still be consistent and work with that card or rule. Avoiding contradictory cards/rules is one of the more challenging pieces of designing the game elements. Still, I can’t just change one thing at a time and get a prototype back because cost wise, it’s more efficient to get as many things done at once so you don’t have to go back for more changes later. The end result is you have to be pretty certain about your game updates and make sure to also modify corresponding rules/cards that are impacted by the changes.

One huge game change is a rule decision about the action cards. I decided to be more particular about how people can use them.  When designing games, I don’t want to run the decisions of players too much or limit what they can do. However, it can create confusion when there aren’t enough guidelines. Even if it is all laid out in the rules, without being specific enough about how to use cards and limiting what can be done, players may disagree on game play and that’s not fun in a game.

With that, I decided to limit Action cards to just be played on one’s turn. Before, it was also on another player’s turn. I was going for players being able to help each other out. However, from the events, a major piece of feedback was that not everyone enjoyed the amount of assistance that could be provided during battle. So to balance the confusion of how/when to use action cards and the abundance of help one could give another player, action cards have to be played on one’s own turn and only battle items can be used to assist another player. So only one of the two types of cards can now be used to assist other players, making it less of a situation where one player wins for another. It feels like a better balance to me.

So, speaking of sweeping changes, in this round here are some others: One-time Use cards moving forward will be referred to Battle Items. 1 action card was moved to yard items, 3 action cards moved to battle items, 4 battle items were moved to action cards, and 1 yard item was moved to battle items, and 1 attachment was modified based on the changes. Several other cards were modified slightly to adjust to these changes. Instead of 6 there are now 5 thrown items, but the same number of each type of item (attachment/action/battle/yard). I essentially played Jenga with the cards to make them fit more efficiently, to give it the most organized structure where I hadn’t before.

Also, the game name will change and that will be announced soon. I’m not quite ready for that yet.